Secretary Arne Duncan would have the world believe that the Common Core standards are opposed only by extremists and people who believe in flying saucers.

But it is not true.

While much of the energy against the Common Core has come from Tea Party people who fear a federal takeover of public schools, there are also thoughtful critics on the left side of the political spectrum. I would begin by mentioning Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen, for starters. And I would add myself, as I am appalled by the way the standards were imposed without any trials in real classrooms and without any real discussion or debate.

The editorial looks at the Common Core through the prism of the disaster that is NCLB. The heavy emphasis on high-stakes tests succeeded mainly in labeling schools as failing when they had high concentrations of children with high needs.

It says:

“The same heavy-handed, top-down policies that forced adoption of the standards require use of the Common Core tests to evaluate educators. This inaccurate and unreliable practice will distort the assessments before they’re even in place and make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it. The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core’s “college and career ready” performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college.

This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation’s urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.”

And the editorial concludes by saying:

“Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. Unless we dismantle and defeat this larger effort, Common Core implementation will become another stage in the demise of public education. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, our communities, and ourselves by telling the truth about the Common Core. This means pushing back against implementation timelines and plans that set schools up to fail, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping and benefiting from this false panacea for the problems our schools face.

Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from classrooms, educators, and school communities, only to put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices, concerns, and realities of our students and communities. Whatever positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what our schools should teach and children should learn has been repeatedly undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.

Unfortunately there’s been too little honest conversation and too little democracy in the development of the Common Core. We see consultants and corporate entrepreneurs where there should be parents and teachers, and more high-stakes testing where there should be none. Until that changes, it will be hard to distinguish the “next big thing” from the last one.”

Secretary Duncan, these are not the ravings of lunatics who watch for black helicopters in the sky. These are the observations of educators who are concerned about the well-being of children and the survival of public education. Attention should be paid.

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Front paged article in today’s NY Times – here’s a clip:
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — Paul G. Vallas, a leader in the effort to shake up American education, has wrestled with unions in Chicago, taken on hurricane-ravaged schools in New Orleans and confronted a crumbling educational system in Haiti.

Now he faces what may be his most vexing challenge yet: Fending off a small but spirited crowd of advocates working to unseat him as superintendent of one of Connecticut’s lowest-performing and highest-poverty school districts.

Bridgeport, a relatively small urban school district with just 21,000 students, is at the center of one of the most contentious educational disputes in the country as Mr. Vallas seeks to salvage his hard-charging agenda amid complaints that he is unqualified for the job.

They now have the full court press out: national papers, city attorneys, high priced private attorney, commissioner who is a lawyer and the attorney general…all fighting and the taxpayers paying to defend a man who was sued individually. The city and the BOE were not sued.

Paul didn’t follow the law created JUST FOR HIM and now he wants a free pass because he is friends with Vallas and Duncan. As a matter of fact, the lawsuit was filed April 1, 2013 and he didn’t pass in his “papers” and have a phone call conversation until approx. one week after this date. Look like he needed a little incentive.

This is not about Bridgeport anymore. This is an all out war to save the godfather of privatization and to close the curtain on the reform charade. Little ole Bridgeport has exposed the fraud for who he really is.

By the way, Paul refers to any on line exposure, such as this blog, of his tactics as: electronic graffiti.

This is not about Bridgeport anymore. This is an all out war to save the godfather of privatization and to close the curtain on the reform charade.

and encourage others to brainstorm future campaigns. This, obviously, is a battle that must (and I think can) be won–at least, rhetorically

Continuing to quote the NYT article, “Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, said the opposition to Mr. Vallas was ‘beyond ludicrous.’ He said too many school districts were afraid of innovation, clinging to ‘archaic ideas.’

‘This, to me, is just another painfully obvious, crystal-clear example of people caught in an old paradigm,’ Mr. Duncan said in an interview. ‘This is the tip of the iceberg.’”

I imagine that the “old” paradigm is the one about true education: students learning and teachers teaching, based upon their philosophies, knowledge, and assessment of the moment, etc. That is, their professionalism, compassion, and fortitude.

Thank you to the editors of Rethinking Schools and to you, Dr. Ravitch for posting this comprehensively written article exposing the truth about Common Core.

The editors really nailed it …

“Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. Unless we dismantle and defeat this larger effort, Common Core implementation will become another stage in the demise of public education. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, our communities, and ourselves by telling the truth about the Common Core. This means pushing back against implementation timelines and plans that set schools up to fail, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping and benefiting from this false panacea for the problems our schools face.”

This is off topic, BUT could you direct me to where I could get accurate info on k12.com. They are running really cute commercials on TV in Ohio (that make me want to vomit), and I would like to address it in a few newspapers in my area. I know the CEO is highly paid. Are you aware of other ways they misuse tax dollars? Yes, I know this is a loaded question. Thanks in advance for your help.

So because the commercials are cute, you have it in for them? And because someone is getting paid a lot of money you have it in for him? It sounds like you have already decided the outcome for your journalistic piece before you even did ANY research. Oh, and trusting another journalist’s already biased opinion from the New York Times doesn’t count as unbiased research. Just because someone is getting paid doesn’t mean they misuse tax dollars. EVERYONE who works for the government is getting paid, including teachers, -that isn’t a misuse of tax dollars. EVERY student that goes to public school gets textbooks and supplies paid for, and the textbook companies profit from that, so how does k12 misuse tax dollars? In truth, k12 schools operate on a much lower budget than public schools, with a better success rate for many students who have parents or learning coaches who care enough to make a difference. I’ve done my own personal study of K12. I live and breathe the curriculum during the school year, and my kids are YEARS ahead of their peers in curriculum. If you want a good story, go to someone who actually knows what is going on. Go to someone is actually familiar with the program. Don’t try to dramatize it and villainize it because you think it makes a good story. Don’t try to go outside and around to people who have only looked at the outside but never cared enough to experience what it really is.

Thank you for this post. It is an important response to Secretary Duncan’s characterization of Common Core critics as wing-nuts. I have been reading the Common Core closely from my perspective as a literacy specialist. I find many holes in the ELA standards that teachers and administrators must be wary of. One concern I have is the call for “rigor”, which I think could lead to inadvisable practices.

It’s important to not allow Arnie and the Reformers to define us by an extreme, conspiracy theory element. Thank you for highlighting this. Now to get it into the public narrative, everyone needs to speak and call and write, write, write.

People don’t seem to understand, at all, either the difficulty or the gravity of deciding, for all students and teachers, what are going to be the important outcomes for an entire field of study. Having a single set of mandatory standards, whether these are state standards or national ones, inevitably narrows pedagogy and curricula, inevitably cuts off many possibilities for BETTER pedagogy, BETTER curricula. If someone has an idea that does not accord with the standards but makes for better teaching, is he or she to wait until the Politburo meets to revise the standards to get a hearing? And given the closed nature of the process of arriving at these standards, what is the likelihood that the new idea will get such a hearing? Apologists for the standards never tire of saying, “But the standards don’t tell you what or how to teach. They are not pedagogy, and they are not curricula.” But right now, all across the country, teachers are receiving their Common Core trainings, and those trainings are specifying particular pedagogical techniques and particular emphases TO THE EXCLUSION OF OTHERS.

One example, and I’ll shut up: I recently watched a French film that contained a scene from a contemporary French secondary school class. In the scene, students were making fun of their Algerian teacher because he was using traditional grammatical terminology and models instead of the terminology and models to be found in contemporary scientific grammars. I found this quite interesting because the new Common Core State Standards in ELA still employ the language of the old, prescientific grammars, which can at best be described as a “folk theory” of how language works. So when do we make the transition to instructing our English teachers in contemporary understandings of how language works. This has evidently already happened in France.

Now, if there weren’t mandatory standards, a brave and innovative publisher could come out with a program with a language component in keeping with what we now know about how language works, and that program could compete in the marketplace and slowly gain momentum. But as it is, with these standards in place, using the old terminology and models, that can’t happen.

Mandatory standards stifle pedagogical and curricular innovation.

If you are an English teacher, try this: Sit down and choose a grade level. Then make a list of domains in your field. Hell, go ahead and use the Common Core breakdowns: reading literature, reading informational text, writing, speaking and listening, and language. Then, choose one of these domains and make a list of what you think the measurable outcomes ought to be in that domain at that grade level. Finally, compare your list to the Common Core. What you will find is that the lists are VERY, VERY different. And yet the Common Core has become the new gospel, and no deviation from this gospel will be allowed.

What I am saying, Duane, is that we now have a number of very well researched, scientific models of grammar, including a highly regarded consensus model, the Minimalist Program, itself a development of the Principles and Parameters model developed and refined by linguists and cognitive psychologists working within the Chomskyan tradition. There is much that is unknown, of course, about language. There is a continuing research program. But much IS known, and almost none of what is now known is taught to English teachers in their teacher prep programs, and none of this scientific work, done over the past 40 years or so, has made its way into or significantly impacted our instruction in this country. That’s not true elsewhere.

If the same situation obtained in physics instruction, we would still be teaching kids about phlogiston and the ether and explaining to them that Aristotle showed that objects use up their motive force as they move. The CCSS language standards are based on a PRESCIENTIFIC, folk model of language that dates back to Hindu grammarians thousands of years ago.

There are many, many lessons to be learned from contemporary scientific grammars that are significantly applicable to ELA and foreign language instruction, and it’s a great pity that the work of drawing those lessons for pedagogy and curricula has, for the most part, not been done.

And, of course, regressive standards help to ensure that that’s not going to happen.

Thanks for the response. Do you have any suggested readings on “consensus model, the Minimalist Program, itself a development of the Principles and Parameters model developed and refined by linguists and cognitive psychologists working within the Chomskyan tradition.”???

There is one text that is LEAGUES above the rest: Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English, by Andrew Radford. Cambridge UP, 2005. There is also a shorter version of the same text. This work is very comprehensive and very readable, really a remarkable achievement of synthesis of the last 40 years of research. GREAT STUFF.

Just adding a bit to your dialog with Duane from a world-language (WL) teacher’s viewpoint. In NJ we have some fine WL teaching & learning standards, PK-12, adapted in the 1990’s from ACTFL stds, which are benchmarked in terms of progress toward proficiency.

The lofty goal of proficiency in a 2nd language has already been circumscribed in the last decade by sacrificing precious recession $’s & student schedule time to increased standardized testing in math & English– only the wealthiest districts have been able to hold onto their early-start elementary FL programs. I shudder to think what the CCSS people will do to our standards once they get past science & history & finally turn their attention to WL.

Yet just by focusing all attention on Eng & math, they already do a disservice. There are those of us who have particular gifts in language-acquisition who are unequally endowed with math smarts. It once was possible within a h.s. curriculum to achieve the bare minimum in math while pursuing WL to high levels. But w/the advent of the fed-knows-all ed approach, a higher level of math is required to graduate h.s. at the expense of skills deemed ‘lesser’.

What you say is right on the mark. Even people who have advocated these standards look in horror as corporate interests take the place of teachers. An example is that in New York City they chose not to use ANY TEACHER MADE MATERIALS and instead used a corporate provider who clearly had no idea which reading belonged in appropriate grades as they chose “A Modest Proposal” for 9th grade which was clearly inappropriate at least for my students. They also chose nothing from contemporary journalism such as the New York Times or the New Yorker, and those publications . yielded some of the best materials for my classes.
Even the College Board, the organization where David Coleman originates, demands that its teachers to write their own curriculum for their Advanced Placement courses. With the Common Core as it moves towards corporatization moves away from teacher empowerment.

Are the standards the issue or the testing associated with them? In another post, a teacher comment that s/he could live with standards, but it’s the testing that is the problem. I know the standards haven’t been field tested and there is too much high stakes testing attached to them. However eliminating the CC won’t take care of the testing issue.

Diane mentioned her work on developing national curriculum (sidelined by the hard core Christians) in one of her books, if I remember correctly. (The Death of Life of the Great American School System). So it doesn’t seem as though a well-thought out standard would automatically be a negative

I assume voucher schools don’t have to follow the CC, maybe that would be a way to fight it?

I would like to point out that opposing CC does not mean creative, optimistic teachers are not meanwhile making the best of the situation. So nobody can assume that if you oppose it you are not doing the best by the children while it is still here. That is what most teachers are doing who cannot organize and/or who see that for the children we need to keep doing the best we can no matter what is handed to us. That is what most have done since NCLB (and meanwhile being shown less compensation in the midst of it).
I just felt the need to point out that while hoping to see some serious reevaluation of CC and RttT (such as that called for in NC lt. Govs questions to Atkinson), those of us in the game will continue to be creative and work with what we have. It is not a black and white situation whereby only those who support CC are creatively tending to their teaching in the midst of it.
Kind of like I dream about a very different kitchen in my house one day, but meanwhile I continue to churn out good cooking and baking with what I have. And while I quietly keep a scrapbook of what my dream kitchen might look like and I will do what I can to one day attain it, I see my children and feed them gladly from the kitchen I have.
It is possible.

It is not just the liberal New York Times which has sold out. In today’s Wall Street Journal there is a long puff piece on Arne Duncan, the point of which is that he talks persuasively to both Democrat and Republican legislators and can even go beyond them to the state Governors and even down to district level with his money and waivers. He also plays basketball with the right people. Meanwhile a science teacher at Mumford high school in Detroit has been named teacher of the year in the Michigan EAA, Education Achievement Authority, a statewide district which takes over and operates ‘failing’ schools. In an interview this morning on WJR her vision of teaching is one of which all of us here would approve, getting to know each student as a person, and making her teaching ‘relevant’ (in this case by linking a nutrition unit to the ‘nutritional desert’ of inner city Detroit. She asked the students what to do about it. They decided to start a community garden at Mumford [which was almost at the geographical center of the July 23, Detroit riot in 1967]). She never mentioned testing, but the philosophy seems to be better test scores THROUGH old-fashioned, personal teaching. All quite bemusing.

My friends from Milwaukee are on target for what’s wrong with the system but don’t have a clue how to fix it. Individualized schools! read our books and start one yourself. “Saving Students fro a shattered System” AND “Quashing the Rhetoric of Reform” show you how to do it yourself.

As former Superintendent Tony Smith left Oakland, California to work in Chicago, the only thing he spoke of was how the community members terrorized he and his family. This was simply not true, however the community did react strongly to oppose his Broad Foundation corporate reforms which included huge cuts, school closures, attacks on our Teachers Union, spending over $100 per year on private consultants and turning over our district to charter schools. Labeling the opposition as trouble makers is part of the school reform plan.

As a first grade teacher, I worry about the standards not being developmentally appropriate for early childhood students. I worry about how many things over time have made their way down from the higher grades to the lower grades. I refuse to stress my first graders out over prepostiions and prepositional phrases, things that have made their way down to first grade in Common Core. I am tired of high stakes testing. That is what ends up determining the curriculum. I teach in a Catholic school, but with everything from textbooks to tests like the SAT and likely the ACT going the way of Common Core, we had to adopt the Common Core Standards. Sure, kids need to learn how to read non-fiction books and be able to carry themselves through such a text, but just like too much emphasis on fiction books is not good, neither is too much emphasis on non-fiction books. As for the writing standards, I am not against making sure that my students can do expository writing, but again, there needs to be balance. If students are not exposed to narrative and fiction writng, we’re killing the next generation of authors like Jan Brett, Ann Rice, etc. Finally, as for text based eveidence, if I have to form an opinion on a topic based on a text that I am required to read and use text based evidence to explain my position, that is not exactly forming my own opinion. I may feel one way about the topic while the text goes in the other direction. However, since I have to use text based evidence to support my opinion, I have to go along with the opinion suggested by the text that I am being required to use.

Reblogged this on Wyoming Against the Common Core and commented:
Diane Ravitch posted a brief summary of a great editorial by Rethinking Schools. It is nice to see that the fight against Common Core comes from all both sides!